A recent post on the WOT forum by a WOT community member details how this person received a PM from a ParetoLogic person questioning why a comment was made that ParetoLogic produces rogues:

The flavor of the PM from the ParetoLogic person was innocence. Additionally, the ParetoLogic person posted this:

“I found it difficult to find specific complaints or reasons for finding ParetoLogic software to be ‘rogue’ or otherwise unworthy.”

That prompted me to do some investigation. Here are the specifics about ParetoLogic rogues . . . and for my example; I have chosen ParetoLogic’s RegCure.

I ran two highly regarded registry cleaners: Auslogics and CCleaner. After they made their scans and I “fixed” the detections so that there were no longer any detections, I ran RegCure and compared the results. As you will see, those results are revealing and it’s why so many people have called ParetoLogic products “rogue“.

The Auslogics scan results:

Auslogics Registry Cleaner

146 errors.

The Auslogics scan results AFTER fixing those errors:

Auslogics Registry Cleaner

ZERO errors.

The CCleaner scan results:

CCleaner

78 errors.

The CCleaner scan results AFTER fixing those errors:

CCleaner

ZERO errors.

So now I’ve cleaned my registry with not one, but TWO cleaners, and BOTH have told me that my registry has NO errors.

So now let’s take a look at RegCure, which I ran AFTER Auslogics and CCleaner indicated I had NO errors in my registry.

The Regcure scan results:

RegCure

A whopping 364 errors, AFTER Auslogics and CCleaner indicated ZERO.

At this point it would be enough even for a beginner to deduce that RegCure is a rogue. But wait, there’s more.

When you click on the button for RegCure to fix those errors, this is what you get:

RegCure

To fix those 364 dubious errors (and coincidentally, you can see that there were ZERO detections on errors that RegCure would fix for free “Font Entries” and “File Associations”…convenient, huh?), you need to PURCHASE the “registered” version. Now if that doesn’t fit the definition of “Scareware/Rogue“, I don’t know what would.

When a less than tech savvy user sees that 364 errors were detected in their registry, they would likely be duped into paying to remove those “errors”.

And I’ve said this many times before when it comes to hundreds of detections. Unless these are trivial, and consequently don’t need to be removed anyway (for a discussion of why, just look at this thread on the AumHa site here.

Scroll about 1/3 the way down to see the exchange between Bill Castner and Mark Russinovich), if you had 364 “serious” errors in your registry, you likely wouldn’t even be able to boot.

Now I can envision a response ParetoLogic might make. ParetoLogic would say something like “RegCure is more thorough”. I might be inclined to buy that, or at least consider it, if the RegCure results were at wide variance with just ONE other cleaner. But two, and good ones at that? C’mon!

So add ParetoLogic to the “Rogue Hall of Shame“.